This beats the competing alternatives mainly by allowing embedded links and graphics if that is important to you--and for me it is. The ping manager/site ping feature is nice too.

Some small faults:

*Feed titles in the XML output are followed by open and closed parentheses: () ???

*Feed titles are truncated after 30 characters (not good) but when you are creating them this is not indicated--you can make them as long as you want, they will just be cut without notice.

*Statistic gathering is not very useful or manageable yet: just IPs and dates for machines accessing any of the feeds without indicating which.

*Button maker appears not to work.

*"Old Settings" option does not have an obvious function. I thought it was to override the default Joomla syndication, but it doesn't do that. At leas tnot the way I have tried.

Developer's site is down, so no support or docs...

This extension needs to be modified to allow embedded images to appear properly in the feed. There is a trailing slash missing in the main component php file where the tag is inserted. instead of "../images/stories" it should be "../images/stories/" -- further formatting of the images in the feeds can be done there.

I am having trouble still getting the images to appear in FeedBurner.

cbm is great when it's working, but different server arrangements can cause it to fail. when it fails, it can really screw up your site in odd ways, like lock you out of the backend, so keep that in mind and unpublish it if things go wild.

THere's good potential here, but this extension does not look as it does in the picture here, and it is only minimally functional:

-speed selection buttons on front end do not appear in IE7.
-conflicts with copies of itself on the same page, and other extensions like joomlaworks' AJAX header rotator.
-unclear config settings, lack of documentation and error trapping, settings can cause SQL errors
-lack of image alignment, sizing, and positioning options. failure of images to load unless "use last image" is selected

for the following reasons, Classifieds hacked to work with CB is functionally superior, though not as pretty.

Marketplace:
-cannot make user email address a non-required field
-user email addresses are displayed unencoded: SPAM magnets
-user can enter junk in email field; does not check for valid email
-all other user info fields cannot be selectively turned on and off per ad type or category; they are either on or off globally
-the admin backend does not use the normal UI to change ordering and parent/child relationships of types and categories. This makes it extraordinarily tedious and frustrating to set up.

Letterman has many very good qualities, and it is the only newsletter component that actually works for me on Mambo 4.5.4. But if I could get MAMML, or ANJEL, or YANC to work (and not break in short order), I would drop Letterman quickly because it has no CB integration.

The so-called CB "integration" for Letterman should be DROPPED and not promoted anywhere, for anyone, at all. Using it is guaranteed to make you a spammer.

The Letterman CB "integration" scheme does not integrate its subscriber list with the core/CB list. You can only create a subscription checkbox in CB (which may be included on the profile pages and at registration), but there is [b]no way to mass-manage or mass-import subscriptions[/b] for people who subscribe this way, and [b]you will receive no notice when they subscribe/unsubscribe[/b]. They cannot unsubscribe without entering their profile page, and [b]Letterman will send these people bogus unsubscription info and links (which assume Letterman's subscriber manager is being used) unless this is removed from the mail footer template, which is not a simple config option.[/b] [i]If you let people subscribe via their profiles, you cannot use Letterman's own subscriber manager because this would create an entirely different list of subscribers that would confuse the people who subscribe with the checkbox.[/i] They might try to get on both lists.

In essence this "integration" makes Letterman's own user manager unuseable unless you don't care about spamming and pissing users off on several fronts.

>:( >:( >:(

Only with extreme caution and MUCH work could you administrate this CB "integration" well. It is also a system that makes it impossible to export your subscriber list short of going into the database itself.

Another serious flaw in Letterman itself is that it uses your base admin email settings with no options for a special newsletter address, a special reply-to or bounce address. That shows disregard for proper emailing procedures and makes it harder to divide labor to different accounts and admins.

in addition to getting all the errors listed by the prevous reviewers, creating a new event results this way:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method mosEventCal_Event::reset() in /home/riverwes/public_html/components/com_eventcal/eventcal.class.php on line 92

No mod, no easy front end event submission? Not a viable replacement for extcal.